In an effort to fend off competition from Verizon’s FiOS service, which offers download speeds of up to 15Mbit per second, Comcast has doubled the speed of its top-tier broadband service to 16Mbit. The change is currently being rolled out in a few markets, including Reston, Va.; Sarasota, Fla.; Fort Wayne, Ind.; and Howard County, Md.

Along with the faster downloads, users will now be able to upload at a speed of 1Mbit per second. The service costs $52.95 USD per month. Other cable operators such as Cox and Adelphia have taken a similar approach to Verizon encroaching on their territory. Comcast says its move was not made specifically in response to the competition, but simply to test new applications it can offer with such high broadband speeds.

Yes, you can get Road Runner Premium at 8 Mbps here for $84. Hopefully, the Comcast move will set a trend, though I suspect Time Warner will need very aggressive speed and pricing competition before they turn up residential bandwidth at lower costs locally.

14 Responses

Downloading at faster speed doesn’t much interest me; few of the web sites I download from can max out my 5Mbit download rate. Uploading at faster speed is significant, because it makes online storage sites like Streamload more viable as part of an offsite backup strategy. However a 1Mbit upload rate still strikes me as too slow; what we really need are symmetric speeds.

I’m with Jim Thompson. When TWC/RR upped their speeds from 2MB/s to 5MB/s some time back, without increasing the upload rate (still stuck at a measly 384KB/s), I called to let them know that I would have been much happier had 1 or 2 of those extra MB/s been added to the upload side instead of the download side. The customer service rep had the gall to try to tell me that I really didn’t want that, and that 384KB/s was all I’d ever need.

Hello? Hello??! [tap tap tap] Is this thing on?

So much for “the customer is always right!”

Once I convinced him I was serious, he changed his story: “We don’t want our customers running servers. Higher upload speeds make personal music streaming and home-hosted websites more viable, and that would lead to a vast expansion of bandwidth usage. We don’t want that to happen. The only way to control that would be to charge customers by the bandwidth they consume (like most web hosting companies do for high bandwidth usage), and we don’t want to do that, either.”

Yeah, right. TWC doesn’t want another way to milk some cash out of their customers? I figured one possible interpretation of his comment was, “Our billing system isn’t set up to charge based on bandwidth consumption, but once we figure out how to do that, we’ll sell you all the bandwidth you want!”

We definitely need higher upstream speeds and the ISPs do not want us to have them. Not unless we switch to business class and pay $199/month for 1.5Mbps SDSL. RR does not listen to anyone. I doubt they care what we think and unless they get some heavy competition they will never change. I donwgraded my service from premium to 5Mbps. You very rarely reach the advertised speeds of 8 Mbps anyway. The small difference in upload (384 to 512) is more important. What is coming up in the near future that will provide some competition in the Houston area? I think that’s all we have left to focus on. Fision for example is one great hope but even though the website states they started in Dec 05 I have not seen much evidence of anything and have received no communication from them after being singed up to their newsletter for a couple of months.

RR definitely knows how to charge for upload bandwidth. If you get their business service, you can pay more to get faster uploads. But, for the most part, the pricing is prohibitive. My recollection is that “normal” business (2.5Mbps down, 384kbps up) is $99/month, but 2.5Mbps down and 1Mbps up is about $300/month.

Comcast may be feeling the heat in Howard County, MD but as the are still unchallenged across the river in Alexandria, VA, poor service, limited choices, and sky-high prices are still the norm. I’d ditch the cable internet and cable for a dish and DSL except that Verizon wants $700 to bring me DSL (older, mid-60s building…they say I need to shoulder the cost for all 12 apts)

I’d love for FIOS to come in and give the an example of “the Southwest effect” much like BWI Airport out here has felt (in comparision to National or Dulles). 1MB downloads? I rarely crack 150 KB currently with those %&^#$^.

I really suspect that bandwidth pricing by the cabel and DSL providers is based more on what we’re willng to pay than the cost of providing the services. Telcos and Cable providers already have the network in place. frequently the install is self-service. SBC mails you a modem and a brochure, TWC will let you go to a service center and pick up the modem. So the customer end of the install is no longer a major cost recovery problem.I think Sacha Cohen a the Washington Post may have the right idea. Starbucks high cost wireless isn’t an option, but there are cafes/bars/eateries in town with free wireless access. Get out of the house and keep your internet addiction under control with your coffee budget — or spend the Roadrunner bill on expresso.

I called the fision office in Hosuton the other day. According to the gentleman I talked to, they are still working on the price structure but are shooting for around $100 dollars a month for the triple play service(Data, TV, Phone) with 10 MB symetrical service. I currently pay 110 a month for Time Warner and 19.95 for the VOIP from another provider, so it sounds like a good deal. Also, the TV is uncompressed digital so the image should look good on large screen TVs. Time Warner tried to tell me that the poor tv quality was do to the large screen size. I know compression artifacts when I see them.